Tag: Development

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced Flutter, their new cross platform mobile SDK.  The new development tool will allow for developers to create native UI frameworks for both Android and iOS that are native to each platform.

The beauty of Flutter is that it comes packing its own rendering engine and framework which, in essence, bypasses the native UI frameworks in both platforms.  This is not something new for developers, especially game developers who have used different rendering engines.  This allows for significant performance increases (particularly on Android).  When you compile the app with the available Android and iOS SDKs, you get the appropriate app & framework for the respective platform.

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google has announced the expansion of the languages supported by Actions for Google Assistant, the SDK that allows developers to leverage Assistant in their apps and solutions.  The new languages, which go live today, include:

• Hindi
• Thai
• Indonesian
• Danish
• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Dutch

These languages join English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian which are already supported.  The new languages are fully supported in development tools too, like DialogFlow and, of course, the Actions SDK itself.

The fourth build of Chrome 65 has landed in the Chrome OS Dev Channel today.  Build 65.0.3325.56 (Platform version: 10323.21.0) is the first updated build since the end of January and it is available for systems that are in the Dev Channel.

For those that aren’t familiar with the different Chrome OS channels, the Dev channel is essentially the alpha channel.  This can be a really rough experience with lots of weird behavior and bugs.  It is aimed at developers and those who like serious bug hunting to see what is coming up in the platform.  This channel is not recommended for daily use on your daily driver Chromebook.

For the third time this month, the Dev Channel for Chrome OS is receiving a Chrome 65 based build update.  The new update is build 65.0.3325.35 (Platform version: 10323.9.0) for those keeping score at home and is bug and stability update.  The channel was updated back on January 19 for the first build of Chrome 65 then followed up on January 24 with a second build.

As mentioned in previous posts about the Dev Channel, it is best to consider it the alpha build channel and it is by no means aimed to be run in production.  It is purely for developers and testers so they can begin working on updates to their apps & extensions to be compatible with the new build.  I do not recommend everyday users of Chrome OS to move to this channel unless you are into bug hunting and like having crash issues. 🙂

In a case that had far reaching implications for Google, Oracle and developers, a jury in San Francisco has ruled in favor of Google over a claim from Oracle and the use of Java APIs in Android.  At the heart of the case were 37 APIs which Google, at the behest of Oracle back in the day, used in the development of Android.  Google argued successfully that the APIs fell under fair use and were not subject to licensing or patent infringement.  While it was never fully disclosed how much Oracle was seeking in damages, it has been suggested it would have been upwards of $9 billion.